The production of newspaper space may be divided into a layout operation for arranging headlines and articles appropriately, an input and edit operation for the headlines and articles on the laid out space, and a printing operation for the edited space. This invention is concerned with the first layout operation. A layout apparatus for producing the newspaper space is typically composed of a monitor for displaying the space to be laid out and a control unit having a program for supporting the layout operation by an operator. In recent years, a personal computer (PC) has been widely used as the control unit.
The production of newspaper space requires not only correctness but also rapidness. However, the conventional layout operation has been done by skilled operators because it requires experience, and unskilled operators spent a long time to perform the operation. Therefore, a layout apparatus that requires a simple operation at the time of layout, is intuitively easy to understand, and has a smaller number of steps is expected.
For example, Japanese Published Unexamined Patent Application No. 2001-109745 discloses a document layout apparatus which can perform a layout design of excellent quality in a short time, even by a unskilled operator. This document layout apparatus comprises a layout control part controlling the layout, an article data storage part storing news to be laid out, a layout dictionary storing various kinds of information regarding reference layouts used in the past, a headline information storage part storing information regarding headlines for reference, a laid out data storage part storing the laid out data of the space, a display unit and an input unit. Layouts created in the past by skilled operators are accumulated in the layout dictionary, and a layout design is made by selecting a desired layout from the layout dictionary, whereby even a unskilled operator can create a layout of high quality in a short time. However, since this layout apparatus involves selecting a desired layout from among a plurality of layouts created beforehand, the layout design could not be made freely.